Although the following description refers primarily to sugar beet seeds, the invention is not restricted to these but is fundamentally applicable to all plants that are of agricultural or scientific importance.
Also in order to satisfy statutory requirements in seed testing, seeds must have certain minimum quality features in order to ensure adequate emergence and growth in the field. The quality of the seeds is a co-determinant in enabling the genotypical yield and quality features in question to develop.
The objective of seed research is, among other things, to obtain the best possible assurance of an early, high and uniform emergence, a high emergence speed, good growth performance and high stress tolerance. This is intended among other things to achieve the greatest possible uniformity of growth, i.e. of the developing plants and of the plants when ready for harvesting, and a high and uniform yield in terms of both quantity and quality.
In the propagation culture which is used to obtain seeds, the influence of the cultivation measures on the seed properties is investigated and monitored. On this basis, new suitably tailored production methods are developed in order to increase and stabilise the yields and quality of the raw seed material.
One quality feature of seeds is their minimum germination capacity. This is generally determined by the methods of the International Seed Testing Association (ISTA).
The seeds are germinated in moistened filter paper of a defined quality under controlled humidity and temperature conditions over a specific period of time. After this time the seeds that have germinated are counted manually.
It is known that certain morphological, anatomical and physiological seed properties have a critical influence on the germination and emergence characteristics in the field.
To obtain further information on the quality of, for example, sugar beet seeds, a number of different test methods are known that can be used for estimating, for example, the emergence potential under field conditions. An overview of this is provided by H. P. Draycott (Editor): “Sugar beet”, World Agriculture Series, Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Known methods for determining germination properties often have the disadvantage that the evaluation is based on decision criteria that cannot or cannot easily be objectivised. Moreover, conventional methods only provide limited information allowing the prospective evaluation of seed, i.e. a prediction of its germination characteristics and particularly its growing power in the field. Seed with a high germination capacity does not necessarily also have good growing power. Thus the germination capacity on its own does not allow any prediction to be made, for example, as to the stress tolerance of the developing plants.
Conventional processes are in addition often labour-intensive and require high staffing levels. As the tests used are essentially manual, certain parameters are dependent on individual assessment by the test staff and are therefore difficult to standardise. A further restriction regarding standardisation results from test media which are not always available in uniform quality, such as for example the (standard) soils required to make the examinations comparable.
The corresponding tests moreover generally take place under certain defined laboratory conditions in which only one particular parameter (humidity, soil coverage, etc.) is investigated at any one time. It is therefore difficult to draw any conclusions as to the field characteristics.
There is therefore a need for automated, preferably fully automatic, objective test methods for evaluating the germination capacity and germination quality of seeds.